Spring is nearly sprung. We all can't wait. We're slipping into sandals every chance we get. We're toying with the idea of scanty clothing. And depending on where we live, we are doing more than toying with it!

But spring is often the season that scares women. We've been able to hide our bodies under layers of thick clothing for months. Now we're afraid that our flesh is not only pasty but a little too jiggly. But we love the feel of that spring air on our skin. It just makes us want to take off our clothes and kick off our shoes. Yet we've been trained to be overly critical of our bodies. To see them as unsightly if they are not in line with a certain type of expectation. Regardless of how big or small a woman's body is, the average woman struggles greatly with her body image.

I say, let's give up on the hunger for acceptance from the masses who have a warped view of what is beautiful. Let's embrace who we are. Where we came from. And what made us the fantastical creatures we are today.

Let's drink it in. And pass it around.

And ever remember these wise words from one of the most beautiful women of our time:

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes ~

It makes utter sense to stay healthy and strong, to be as nourishing to the body as possible. Yet I would have to agree, there is in many women a "hungry" one inside. But rather than hungry to be a certain size, shape, or height, rather than hungry to fit the stereotype; women are hungry for basic regard from the culture surrounding them. The "hungry" one inside is longing to be treated respectfully, to be accepted, and in the very least, to be met without stereotyping. If there really is a woman "screaming to get out" she is screaming for the cessation of the disrespectful projections of others onto her body, her face, her age.

The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose [is] to protect, contain, support, and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling--that is the supreme psychic nourishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight...The body is the launcher of those experiences. Without body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, there would be no sense of lifting, no sense of height, of weightlessness.

The body is like an earth. It is a land unto itself. It is as vulnerable to overbuilding, being carved into parcels, cut off, overmined, and shorn of its power as any landscape.

There is a line in Ntozake Shange's "for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf." In the play, the woman...speaks after having struggled to deal with all the psychic and physical aspects of herself that the culture ignores or demeans. She sums herself up in these wise and peaceful words: